Modi government just 28,000 households away from reaching 100% electrification

Only 28,594 households have been left to be electrified across the country, according to the official data by Ministry of Power. Of the number, while 20,134 households are left in Chhattisgarh, 8,460 are yet to be electrified in Rajasthan, the Saubhagya dashboard showed. To date, 16,94,616 and 7,07,727 households have been electrified in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, respectively.

The Saubhagya scheme envisages providing last mile connectivity and electricity connections to all remaining households in rural as well as urban areas to achieve universal household electrification.

Achieving 100 per cent household electrification was one of the aims of the present government. However, it could not meet the self-imposed deadline of December 2018 for the scheme. For a village to qualify as ‘electrified’ under the scheme, power cables from the grid need to reach a transformer in every village and only 10 per cent of its households, including public places (schools and health centres) need to be connected.

The task of household electrification is almost complete. As many as 2.5 crore unelectrified households were identified. All willing households will (under Saubhagya scheme) be provided electricity connection by March 2019, Finance Minister Piyush Goyal had said in his budget speech, adding that till the financial year 2014, only about 2.5 crore households in the country were without electricity.

The Saubhagya Scheme or Pradhan Mantri Sahaj Bijli Har Ghar Yojana is a government project to provide electricity to all households. The project was announced in September 2017 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who said that the aim was to complete the electrification process by December 2018. On November 16, 2017, the government launched a website saubhagya.gov.in to disseminate information about the scheme.